


Of Hope In What Will Come

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-03
Updated: 2011-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-26 14:57:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/284590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In place of a nursery, Amy decorates a room for her grown daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Hope In What Will Come

Amy Pond has lived too many lives in too many realities. In one life she played house alone; in another, she was play-married to Rory and Melody was their daughter and they fought about how stupid it was because Melody was _older_ than both of them. Melody never seemed to mind much.

In one life she decorated a room for a baby, yellow and golden and full of sunshine, and she learned to bake and garden and all the other things a mum was supposed to understand, and then she drove herself into a lake and woke up from their dream.

In one life she woke up in a sterile white cell straight out of science fiction, in the middle of giving birth to a daughter she hadn’t even been expecting. Her daughter’s nursery was a plain white capsule, sterile and safe and so very empty of love.

_In some places, white was the color of death, Amy remembered as she lay her daughter in her too-clean crib._

Amy goes home in this reality with empty arms and an aching heart. River hangs about a bit, makes tea and tries to talk, but Amy is too numb for any of that to matter. As soon as River… as soon as her daughter leaves, she climbs the stairs and creeps down the hallway to the room they’d been saving for when they decided to have a baby. The walls are yellow, but they never got any further in decorating it; better to wait until they had more reason to prepare.

A room meant for a baby she would never really have. A granddaughter she could never explain to her parents, a child she would never walk to school or take to the park.

She stands in the doorway, imaging the room as she would have furnished it, until night falls and Rory creeps up the stairs to tug her into bed.

* * *

Rory is gone the next morning when she wakes. There is a note on the bedside table— _I’m so sorry, Amy, but the hospital called wanting to know if I was going to bother showing up for my shift, I had to run in_ —and she folds it up and places it back on the table.

For a long time after, she simply doesn’t move.

It’s nearly afternoon when she climbs out of bed. She showers and dresses, for all the world as if it were a day like any other, and she goes out and buys a bed. It’s a very nice bed, probably nicer than she and Rory can necessarily afford, but she’s heard the Doctor complain about substandard mattresses and she won’t have that when he comes to visit. She doesn’t have any illusions about where he will be sleeping.

It takes a month and a probably unhealthy cut of their budget, but by the end of it Amy has transformed the spare room into a bedroom for River. It’s quite nice, she thinks, all off-white walls and dark wooden furniture and TARDIS-blue blankets. It’s a room for River and a room for the daughter she only barely got to meet, and most of all, it is a room for her. The nursery she never got to decorate for her baby, the lullabies she never learned to sing and the lunches she never packed.

She shuts the door behind her as she leaves. No one ever opens it.

* * *

Somehow the room finds its way into their new house, and Amy wonders what the Doctor thought, seeing the room she’d laid out for her daughter. And three months after he leaves them, she wakes to find the always-shut door hanging slightly ajar. She opens it slowly, with trembling hands.

“River?” she whispers, and the shape in the bed shifts and suddenly River is blinking at her.

“Hi,” River says, shyly and a bit sleepily, “I hope you don’t mind—I got here later than I planned and you’d already gone to sleep… so I thought… it’s just…”

“No, I, of course!” Amy says, quickly. “It’s… it’s your room. I decorated it for you. I… I hope you don’t mind…”

“It’s perfect,” River says, with a smile.

Amy makes her way to the bed, nervous and uncertain. River sits up and pats the mattress beside her.

“I can’t stay for long,” River says, as Amy sits. “They always look here first when I go missing from prison, because they know I’ll turn up sooner or later, but I really just couldn’t face those rocks they call mattresses tonight.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Amy replies, hesitantly.

There’s a slight change of light from outside, and River winces.

“That’ll be them. I’d better go—oh, and, mum? There’s another room for you to decorate as a nursery in this house, and you should probably start picking out paint.”

Amy only just barely catches her daughter’s wink before she disappears in a flash of light.

* * *

  



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